Question 3: What do we want students to know and understand about individual events and people and, perhaps, individual themes within KS3 History?
Debates about ‘content’ at KS3 seem to revolve around what’s in and what’s out rather than the at least equally important question of what we might want children to know and understand about individual topics and themes. A great deal of time has been spent analysing levels of understanding of evidence, causation etc but comparatively little time seems to have been spent on thinking about what constitutes a desirable level of understanding of the Norman Conquest for a student in Year 7 – what counts as baseline knowledge and understanding, what would be an ‘average’ attainment, what would be outstanding? More broadly, WHY are we teaching the Norman Conquest – or any of the other individual events or people that might go into a scheme of work? What does knowledge and understanding of a topic contribute to children’s broader historical knowledge being developed at KS3?
The danger is that if we don’t have clear answers to those questions about individual topics then this again contributes to an atomized, bitty curriculum, potentially full of enjoyable activities, anecdotes and even developing worthwhile historical skills – but does such a collection of ‘events coverage’ add up to anything worthwhile in knowledge terms?
The Norman Conquest is the classic example. It’s a grand, enthusing start to Year 7 for many people – a great story, full of drama and personality, wonderful for source-work – but exactly why is it taught? What do Year 7’s take-away in terms of knowledge that links to later parts of their History course – and linking to later topics is vital to provide the opportunity to return, briefly, to that knowledge and keep it alive? Knowledge that isn’t re-used rapidly gets forgotten - we all discover that if we don’t teach a topic for a couple of years.
So, what are the possibilities within coverage of the Norman Conquest for helping students with any of the thematic stories? Do you focus on the power of the crown, ordinary people’s lack of power and why their views were easily suppressed? Or perhaps students could take away an understanding of why wars are fought and what motivates men to risk their lives in battle? Choosing either or both of those requires a particular choice of enquiry question/s and material, thinking through the desired knowledge outcomes and gearing the activities to those outcomes. The ability to tell the story of the events of 1066 is therefore necessary background, at whatever level the story can be told, but it’s what is then launched from that background that’s vital and re-useable later. A vital part of planning about teaching about the Conquest is identifying in advance what kinds of knowledge you want children to retain and use again about later events and issues.
This discussion of 1066 deserves more space and I hope to pick it up again in the future, along with discussion of other classic topics, the kind that perhaps have such an obvious place in the curriculum that’s it easy not to think about why they’re there. But for now, to sum up question 3, I think there's real debate to be had, about why we teach any individual topic and what we knowledge of each event we want students to retain. This in turn would open up a secondary question, one that researchers are used to asking about concepts – what understandings do KS3 students have about ….? But instead of completing the sentence with ‘evidence’ or ‘significance’ we might complete it with ‘The Industrial Revolution’ or ‘The Black Death’.
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